This invention relates to a paperboard carton blank and carton for packaging and dispensing plastic bags, more particularly disposable baby bottles, which are formed and packaged as a flat plastic tube in a continuous roll and separated for use by tearing them off along perforated lines in the tube which form the bags as separate units.
The well-known plastic bags called "Baggies" are formed and dispensed from the package in this manner. To form them, a continuous plastic tube of the desired size and strength is formed as by blow molding. The tube is heat-sealed to form seams at intervals which are the desired length of the bags and perforated at locations with respect to the heat seams such that a closed bag bottom is formed on one side of the perforations and an openable bag top on the other. Rolls of such bags are hung in supermarkets at the "produce" stands. If a customer buys tomatoes in bulk, he tears a plastic bag off the roll, inserts the tomatoes he wants and takes them to the checkout counter where they are weighed and paid for. Such bags are sold in packaged rolls.
The baby food industry has developed "disposable milk bottles". These are essentially small plastic bags which in use are fitted to a rigid plastic bottle holder from which baby drinks.
To facilitate dispensing, such a baby bottle may be formed with a tab or projection at the center of what becomes the bottom. The user pulls on this tab to withdraw a bottle and sever it along the perforation from the succeeding bottle to which it is attached.
The packaging industry has developed a carton part of the top of which, when severed along a perforation, has a central tab which, when pushed down into the carton interior, will tend to impale the leading edge of the succeeding bottle to help restrain it against the force required to separate the bottle being removed. But this tab protrudes in the direction of withdrawal of the bottles and has to be forced down against the bottles by the user's finger while the bottle being withdrawn is turned back against it.
As a part of the "floppy" top structure, this arrangement does not have much inherent strength. The user's finger would be just as effective without the tab.
It is accordingly the general object of this invention to provide an improved carton which has an operative tab structure of much greater rigidity and effective strength to resist the force required to remove and sever succeeding bags, particularly disposable baby bottles, and a blank for making it which can be formed into a tube and then shipped flat.